I love thinking about how massively expanded the territory of film making could become.
After citizens of the world get over whatever stages of grief and healing that they need to get over.
After “things are set right” and we’re no longer under the control of and being haunted by minority numbered yet majority powered masters.
Tonight, I was thinking of one single historical-fiction character that could be reborn and reimagined -the Civil War Era American slave owner character. The changes would be amazing in scope.
No longer would we be still stuck watching the same old angry, red faced and mutton chopped “Mr. Becker” wielding his whip and looming over the same poor, whipped and bloodied body of “Toby”.
We wouldn’t keep seeing the same dark hearted, pale skinned, arrogant and “upstanding” stereotype. We’d finally be free to explore characters molded around the other very real and very undepicted personalities of thousands of other men who owned slaves. Even including the rarely (if ever) mentioned well-to-do Black and Native American slave owners.
None of these additional personality types would count as “majority percentage” types, I’m sure. No more or no less than the grossly exaggerated white male bigot abuser should have been; the one that Massa’s been flinging into our faces forever.
We’d craft stories around the young slave owners who had the good fortune of having good business as well as decent ethical common sense. The single slave owner who shared drinks with his plantation blacksmith, to laugh with him and share “girl trouble” stories. The slave owner whose workers treated him like family because he was prone to do the same.
The widowed slave owner whose respects and courtesies extended to all women, whether they were high society or lower-class labor. White or Brown. Even to the point of courting and winning the favors of a handsome older slave woman who became widowed herself, from his plantation, where she and her family lived and worked for decades.
We could see more stories woven around the (actively working on the farm) slave owners who forged their own loving families (although illegally so in some states) from unions with their slaves-as opposed to the tales of terror of them siring countless broods, from ransacking and raping their ways through their slave cottages every other drunken night. Like wild maniacs.
We could see stories of half siblings (slave owner and slave related) who were allowed to know each other and grow up with one another- as long and as close as the laws and their fathers’ discretions allowed. Especially when the generations started producing white skinned field hands (quadroons) who were born into contractual bondage.
We could finally (and what a blessed day that would be) excavate hundreds of untold stories of the white men and women who literally sacrificed their own lives to protect their slaves from the boiled over tensions which spilled over from the North as well as the South. We could finally express more voices from the slave families who had the very best of lives and educations as their Master or Mistress could willingly provide.
There could even be an expansion of the darker side of things. While still avoiding the murdering and whipping standard. More sketches of the abusive Mistress could be spun. The “lady” of the house who sexually harasses the field help. Or the “lady” of the house who carried out hysterical abuses against innocent female slaves because of drunken paranoia, thinking her husband was spending secret “times in the shed” with the help..when in reality he was enjoying his extracurricular activities in a tavern miles down the road. With other men.
Swinging it back to a lighter side, we could even dig into the little advertised notion of how a few mistresses ended up bearing babies from illicit slave relations, who ended up raising them in “disguised” situations or giving them up for adoption.
The possibilities could explode..in that single section of character development alone.
Many times, when I start entertaining the thoughts of different eras, different topics and different plots, I get to feeling light headed, visualizing it as clearly as I can.
Especially (as in the case of the following excerpt from an old newspaper-March of 1853) when one considers the vast amount of information that’s been purposefully kept from our attentions and out of our history books. Where the strictest and sternest actions have always been executed and stubbornly maintained over the centuries.. for the sake of keeping it that way.
This particular article detailed the issue of unreported abuses against and neglect of White slaves.
There could be a new dawning for the roles of all men in general. Instead of the dull and heavy transparency of dragging the male deeper and deepest in negativity, he could be lifted up and out all over the place.
As a side order cherry on top, if it happened to coincide with a gradual return of our healthy and unmolested biological systems (the rights to and direction in the growth of) as they were meant to be, the shedding of the need to forcefully “coerce” everyone (in matters of “unisexuality”, for one) it could blossom into a rich new appreciation and a robust celebration of each gender’s natural contributions.
I suspect that all of the traits, which made it hard for us to keep our hands and adoring eyes off of one another in the first and longest running place, would be back in place, firmly and finely form fitted.
Artistic definitions for family units, business dynamics, new directions in science fiction, lovemaking..(with appropriate boundaries kept or blown wide open, according to each individual ‘tribe’s’ wishes and needs, with agreement from their own people..no one else’s)..with a longer list of other areas, would broaden and spill over into decades of fresh ideas and intensely creative possibilities. They would be films created by, with proper respects paid to, artists who were no longer rejected nor held down by Old “New” Order strangulations and steel fisted oversight.
See? I’m feeling that giddy delight again, just thinking about it.
One day, hm?
Ramsy's Joint 